NewsCorp has hired Joel Klein and bought 90% of Wireless Generation! (How will Mike Bloomberg feel about buying from Rupert Murdoch?)

East Gate has a NotesAboutNotes site to pitch the importance of having both a paper NoteBook and a digital (TinderBox) one.

Paolo Pedercini, of the Mc Donalds Game, has a new Oligarchy Computer Game out, tied to the Cheap Oil economy. The review examines, among other things, the Model used, and throws out the idea of shared Simulation as Accountability Arena: What if had something like MetaPlace but for procedural rhetoric? What if we let people build and alter arguments (Argumentation) and models? It's like two Wicked design problems for the price of one, but if you consider that monetary systems, energy systems, social systems, legal systems, and so forth, are all at the least game-like clusterfucks if not outright games (Real World Game), then it might be worth it to let people construct models that are literally applicable and also lead by example.

Doing some reading on Activity Streams.

Enterprise Integration Pattern-s ISBN:0321200683 (more)

aka Soviet Union

Lots of parents would like to get their kids to learn Computer Programming, but the kids want to build Computer Game-s, which are often quite a challenge. (more)

Dmitry Orlov doesn't seem too optimistic about a Community Organizing/Resilient Community model. Community organizing is quite wonderful, and can provide some of us with a perfectly pleasant way to while away our remaining happy days. As a useful side effect, it can provide individuals with valuable training, but it does next to nothing to prepare the community for Collapse... The central problem with community organizing is that the sort of community that stands a chance post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it is uncomfortable, and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want any part of it. (more)

Metaplace was a software platform intended to democratize the development of Virtual World-s.[1] The platform is developed by Areae (now officially changed to Metaplace Inc.), the company established by Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies designer Raph Koster. According to the official website, the platform is "client-agnostic", which means that virtual worlds developed on Metaplace can be accessed using any device that connects to the Web. (more)

I'm interested in getting my first-grader exposed to the gestalt of modern scientific thinking - nonlinearity, dynamics, Emergence, Complexity Theory, Evolution, etc. (more)

maybe a better idea than a Third Party for the US. (more)

Robert Scoble thinks Google can't do Innovation anymore. (more)

Eric Ries says a Start Up should embrace Technical Debt. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants... Most of us think we know a good design when we see it. Unfortunately, no matter how much up-front analysis we do, until the design is tested by actual practice, we can't really know... Leverage product development with open source and third parties (which have their own debt)... Given the choice between incurring technical debt in a particular end-user-visible feature and incurring the same level of debt in a core system, I'd much prefer the former... Teams that practice an agile or lean development process are able to minimize the accumulation of technical debt without sacrificing speed, because they work in smaller batches. They also take better advantage of debt, because they find out sooner if a particular investment has paid off... Taking on technical debt does allow investing energy elsewhere, but other new features are not the only option. We can trade technical debt for process improvement, too. If that improvement pays off (by reducing the batch size of our work, for example), it becomes easier to address all technical debt in the future - including the debt just incurred. And because any particular debt might never come due, this is a better trade. To take one concrete example, it's often worthwhile to write test coverage (Unit Test) for legacy code even without taking the time to refactor... We can choose a disciplined approach to making proportional investments in prevention and paying down debt, such as Five Whys... When I talk and write about the advanced product development process at IMVU today, like the cluster immune system or the disciplined approach we take to split-testing and interaction design, it may sound as if we had that capability from the start. Nothing could be further from the truth... n the end, what mattered wasn't that we did everything right, but that our fundamental approach was flexible and resilient. At no point did we stop everything and do a ground-up rewrite. Instead, we incrementally improved our process, architecture, and infrastructure, always learning and adjusting. (more)

Internet Black List bill (more)

COICA was passed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because it is so ill-conceived and poorly written, the law professors wrote, “the Act, if enacted into law, will not survive judicial scrutiny, and will, therefore, never be used to address the problem (online copyright and trademark infringement) that it is designed to address. Its significance, therefore, is entirely symbolic — and the symbolism it presents is ugly and insidious. For the first time, the United States would be requiring Internet Service Providers to block speech because of its content.”... To be fair, COICA does have some supporters in addition to sponsor Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vermont) and his 17 co-sponsors including Chuck Schumer, Arlen Specter, Charles Grassley, Kristen Gillibrand, Orrin Hatch, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Coburn, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Bob Menendez and Sheldon Whitehouse... Over the course of his career, Leahy has received $885,216 from the TV, movie and music industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (more)

Several nonprofit and medical institutions in Cleveland Oh have turned to the Mondragon Cooperatives model for a consortium of businesses that will provide needed services and bolster an impoverished community. (Details from Evergreen Cooperatives.) One hallmark of the Mondragon model is its use of capital. Rather than flowing into the pockets of executives and outside investors, a company's profits are distributed in a precise, democratic way; set aside as seed money for new cooperatives; distributed to regional nonprofits; or pooled into shared institutions like the university and research center. In other words, each individual cooperative gains long-term benefits from the financial assets of the whole. (How this would play out in the context of U.S. tax rules remains to be seen.) In Cleveland, the Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund, managed by Shore Bank Enterprise Cleveland, provides low-interest, long-term financing. In the future, a financial institution more aligned with Caja Laboral (Mutual Bank), which also handles consumer saving and lending, might be developed. (more)

reinforcing FeedBack loop (more)

Robin Chase sees a model for "Cooperative Capitalism": Here is the formula: 1. Identify excess capacity. 2. Build a platform for others to share (Sharing)/engage with this excess capacity. 3. Appreciate unanticipated benefits. Economics Of Abundance

John Robb attended a presentation by Dmitry Orlov on the "Five Stages of Collapse". (more)

a federation of worker cooperatives (CoOp) based in the Basque region of Spain. Founded in the town of Mondragón in 1956, its origin is linked to the activity of a modest technical college and a small workshop producing paraffin heaters. Currently it is the seventh largest Spanish company in terms of turnover and the leading business group in the Basque Country. At the end of 2009 it was providing employment for 85,066 people working in 256 companies in four areas of activity: Finance, Industry, Retail and Knowledge. (more)